North Korea highlights incentive system in agriculture

A panoramic view of North Korea's "socialist rural cultural village" at Sohung County in North Hwanghae Province. Yonhap.

By Jung Da-min

North Korea is offering incentives to encourage farmers to produce more ahead of the harvest.

Workers' Party's mouthpiece Rodong Sinmun Thursday ran interviews with agriculture ministry officials, highlighting a "field responsibility system within sub-work team system" for improved output.

Since he took power, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has been emphasizing this system, in which workers in a group of three to five may take home surplus output from the field in which they work.

"Maximizing the spiritual power of agricultural workers is a preliminary problem in winning the last farming battle," Ju Chol-kyu a ministry official, told the newspaper. "One way of doing this is to make sure the field responsibility system produces actual results."

He said "equalitarianism" in distribution hampers the country's agriculture growth, emphasizing that all agricultural workers should take full responsibility for their allocated areas and that the country's political and economic projects should also be run to promote such a system.

North Korea's field responsibility system is similar to China's family farming, according to an observer of the North Korea economy.

"Kim Jong-un adopted the field responsibility system because the existing sub-work team system did not really work, even though the number on a workers' team has been reduced to 25, as against 100 in the early days of cooperative farming," said Kim Bo-geun, who has a doctorate in North Korean economy studies from Korea University.
"With this small number of three to four, workers tend to work harder because they often work with their own family members."

Kim also said the North has adopted a profit-oriented reward system away from one based on hours spent in a given area of work.

"North Korea has concluded it works better to improve productivity," he said, saying this view was spreading to other areas of its economy.